Caching: plugin vs. browser
 

I might not be the only one who's a little confused about the whole caching issue.

In a continuing effort to speed up my site, I'm revisiting the wp-cache plugin. I had it running a while back but removed it when the hosting company said they had had problems with it on other sites.

Later on, Juggledad did some custom detective work for me and discovered several anomalies on my site, fixed those, and now things are running much better. Thank you, JD!

Now I figure I'll try a caching plugin again. So I have wp-cache running, I've enabled the visible stopwatch in the footer, and I've got CSS and JS set to external. I'm getting 1.410 seconds with Safari and 1.650 with Firefox. Both are after dumping the browser cache.

I would appreciate some of you visiting http://www.larchmontgazette.com and tell me what reading you get in the footer, what your browser and platform are, then dump cache and try again. That would be very helpful.

I don't quite understand.....if wp-cache is caching pages and serving them up as static pages, how does that affect the browser's cache? If I dump the browser cache and reload a page, what am I getting?

To do a really clean test, I also dumped the wp-cache cache file and started fresh with clean browser caches, too. I guess that means any other readers after that were also getting uncached pages, right?

Hey Paula:

I'm glad to hear someone else sounding as confused on this subject as I've always known I was (am?).

I'm PC WinXP SP3, Firefox 3.5.5 and your footer reported: 88 queries. 1.486 seconds.

I cleared the entire browser history and received exactly the same numbers.

I switched the tab' rendering engine to IE and saw EXACTLY those same numbers again.

Let me know if I'm not doing what you need done. It seems a mite strange to me that those numbers remain EXACTLY the same.

Jim

Ok, here is my understanding. There is Broswer caching (on your computer) and plugin caching (on the server).

If you have a caching plugin, they generally built a page the first time someone calls for it and store the generated html in the cache. As long as the plugin doesn't see anything has changed in the DB and the page hasn't expired (figured out by a magic formula known only by the trolls under the server), anyone who requests the page gets the same copy. Theoretically you could be seeing a page that was built a day ago, if nothing has changedchanges.

Then there is the caching in your own browser. The Browser also store a copy of the page and there is some mechanism that decides weither to show you the stored page or goback and request the page from the server again.

These are two factors on how fast you see the page. but don't forget all the other things
How fast your computer is
how busy is your local network
how busy is your ISP
how busy is the internet
how busy is your host provider
how busy is the server you are on

sigh